Tour of Black Panther Sites / Former member shows how party grew in Oakland

Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, October 25, 1997

1997-10-25 04:00:00 PDT OAKLAND -- The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was about politics, as its name implies, not about destruction. This is the cry of David Hilliard, who has taken up the task of reminding the old and teaching the young that the Panthers were idealism in action at a time when Oakland needed it most.

Today, Hilliard, the party's former chief of staff, leads the first- ever bus tour of Panther historical sites in Oakland.

The trip, which he hopes to repeat once a month to raise money for the nonprofit Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, will cover a lot of ground in a short time. This is possible because so many landmark Panther actions were compressed into a small section of the city during a period of only two to three years.

"The gravity of the situation boggles my mind even yet," said Hilliard, 55.

Panther history is subject to interpretation, and the tour reflects Hilliard's version of what mattered during his time with the party, from 1966 to 1974. Just one year brackets the most notable extremes.

In the spring of 1967, Newton, the party's founder and role model,

came up with the idea of sending an armed delegation to the floor of the state Assembly in Sacramento to protest proposed gun law restrictions. History often recalls only the wild Panther image, but the message that day embodied the second half of the party's name -- that blacks would defend themselves against police brutality.

The plans for Sacramento were made at party Chairman Bobby Seale's house on 57th Street, an early Panther meeting place where Seale would often cook up smothered steak and Rice-A-Roni. The Seale home is Hilliard's tour stop No. 4.

Visible across Martin Luther King Way -- stop No. 5 -- is the former Merritt Junior College, a center of black activism in the early 1960s where Newton and Seale met as students.

A year after Sacramento and two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the spring of 1968, came the other extreme. The party's youngest leader and one of Hilliard's mentors, 17-year- old "Li'l" Bobby Hutton, died in a gun battle with Oakland police. The battle occurred as the party was splitting between those who wanted the spark of revolution to be struck in the aftermath of the King killing and those who favored sticking to Newton's more gradual approach. By this time, the FBI had infiltrated the Panthers in an effort to break the party.

The location, one of the most moving for Hilliard, who hid under a bed during the gunfight, is stop No. 12.

"I saw the fire engines here washing up the blood," Hilliard said this week as he stood at the curb in front of 1218 28th St., where Hutton fell. "And I heard the lady screaming, 'They killed the young one.' "

Hilliard will narrate the story of his idol and childhood friend Newton as he tells that of the party. Thirty years ago next week, Newton was wounded and Oakland police officer John Frey killed when gunfire erupted during a traffic stop at Seventh and Willow streets in West Oakland. This is the 14th point on the tour.

Newton's followers feared their leader would be convicted of murder and sent to the gas chamber. That night at the Newton house on 47th Street -- stop No. 9 -- Hilliard assured Newton's mother that, no matter what, Huey would be free.

So began the "Free Huey" movement. It brought new blood to the Panthers after many of the party's core members had been prosecuted for the Sacramento action. It made a national figure out of Newton, who would serve prison time for a voluntary manslaughter conviction that was later overturned. But it also attracted guerrillas, adventurers and government infiltrators who would take the organization in a direction that Hilliard believes Newton never intended.

In his autobiography, Hilliard writes that he struggled with more militant allies and his own feelings of inadequacy to hold Newton's ideological line. He paid for those years with a nonstop ulcer.

Newton didn't believe uprisings were the path to revolution, which is one reason Oakland was relatively quiet in the riotous summer of 1968. He said the public wasn't ready for armed struggle. Neither were the Panthers, according to a government spy's assessment of their organization and weaponry at the time.

Newton's later years can be viewed as less than heroic. He was convicted of weapons charges in connection with the alleged pistol- whipping of a tailor, he pleaded no contest to embezzling state money intended for the Panthers' school and he became caught up in drug use.

But to Hilliard, Newton should be remembered for the inspiration and action he brought to the Panthers.

Hilliard -- long over his ulcer, recovering from his own alcohol and drug addictions -- believes in the lasting relevance of the party's original manifesto for economic justice, the Ten Point Program. It was written 31 years ago this month by Newton and Seale in Seale's office at a federal anti-poverty agency at 55th and Market streets. The building, which now houses a beauty shop, is the first stop on Hilliard's tour.

"There was a generation of young people who had a vision and had a responsible agenda," said Hilliard, who is executive director of the Newton foundation, formed in 1993 to carry on the Panthers' social programs. "We always had an agenda, but the first real response was police repression, so we started the police patrols because of the brutality and unbridled racism in the community."

Self-determination for the black community was point No. 1, followed by demands for full employment, reparations for slavery, decent housing and education and freedom for black prisoners.

The Panthers pursued the goal of self-determination through efforts they called survival programs. Tour stop No. 11 commemorates this side of Panther history. Here, at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church at 2624 West St., the party began a free breakfast program for children in 1969. Ultimately, party and church members gave out free clothing, medical care and tested people for sickle cell anemia.

The survival programs were much imitated across the country. They, along with the racial integration of police departments, exemplify the side of the Panther legacy Hilliard is trying to keep alive.

"There seems to be no collective memory of what we did 30 years ago," Hilliard said. "This foundation is the outlet, so we can bridge the gap."

The first Panthers were the sons of migrants from the rural South. Most came from strong family backgrounds. As Hilliard relates in his autobiography, they were used to fighting and to racial oppression. In Oakland, they encountered a police force made up of the same kind of white rural Southerners they had left back home.

Primed by their background and their experiences growing up in Oakland, with its history of radical trade unionism, they experimented with revolutionary politics. Hilliard, who had arrived in California from Alabama at age 11 on the Daylight, read the autobiography of Malcolm X in one night. For him, Newton was Malcolm personified.

Several steps ahead, Newton studied the Algerian revolution and paraphrased Mao. He would speak of the "colossal events" that hasten revolution. He would have them -- from Sacramento right up until his murder in 1989 by a drug dealer trying to make a name for himself. The site of the murder is stop No. 15 on the bus tour.

"What's really ironic," Hilliard said, "is that in court the guy who killed Huey said he used to eat in our breakfast program."

Stenciled on the sidewalk where Newton fell are fading silhouettes of the founder in paramilitary pose.

Newton "was one who used his own life to make an example," Hilliard said. "He always embraced theory and practice. What Huey said, Huey did. . . . People had respect for that."

Panther tour buses board at 18th and Adeline streets at noon. Tickets may be purchased for $20 in advance by calling (510) 986- 0660. They cost $25 the day of the tour.

BLACK PANTHER TOUR

1 -- Panthers wrote their Ten-Point Program here at the Office of Economic Development Corp., 5500 Market St.Oct. 15, 1966, calling for adequate housing, jobs, education and an end to police brutality.

2 -- Corner of Market and 55th streets: Party members stopped motorists and escorted children across intersection in 1967 after several students from nearby Santa Fe Elementary School had been killed by cars at the spot. Panther pressure helped lead to installation of stoplight in August 1967.

3 -- 898 56th St.: Home of Bobby Hutton, a Panther member killed in a gunbattle with police April 6, 1968.

6 -- 5624 Martin Luther King Jr. Way (now It's All Good Bakery): Site of Panthers' first office in 1967.

7 -- 5350 Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Martin Luther King Jr. Way at 25th Street: Liquor stores and taverns once owned by Bill Boyette, former president of Cal-Pak business association. Panthers boycotted the businesses in a dispute with Boyette over contributions to the party.

8 -- 4722 West St.: Former home of David Hilliard, party's first chief of staff.

9 -- 881 47th St.: Newton family moved here after arriving from Monroe, La., in 1945.

10 -- 4419 Martin Luther King Jr. Way: Panthers' second office.

11 -- 2624 West St.: Formerly St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, now St. Andrew's Baptist Church. Home of Panthers' free breakfast program for children, which started in 1969, and subsequent community "survival programs."

12 -- 1218 28th St.: Site of 1968 shootout with police that left Hutton dead and Eldridge Cleaver in custody.

13 -- 1048 Peralta St.: Panthers' fourth office; party had moved headquarters to Berkeley but returned to West Oakland in fall 1969.

14 -- Seventh and Willow streets: Gunfire erupted Oct. 28, 1967, after police made a traffic stop of Newton. The Panther leader was wounded and Officer Herbert Haines was killed. Newton was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but the conviction was later overturned.

17 -- 1200 Lakeside Drive: Newton lived in a penthouse here in the 1970s. The party said it provided security against police.

18 -- De Fremery Park, Adeline and 14th streets: Site of several Panther community programs and rallies.

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